In international terms quite probably, but in the hearts and minds of a good chunk of the US, especially evangelicals, Israel has a unique and somewhat protected status regardless of its not so admirable realpolitik behavior.
Every time I hear about Israelis pushing into territory they don’t have claim to while being self-righteous about the bombs being lobbed at them, I can’t help but thnk that Israel is the stupid one. Now maybe the ones who are complaining about the bombs are not the same folks who doing the illegal settling. In that case, that’s sad. But just as I can’t muster up sympathy for the rocket/bomb throwers, I can’t for the land-grabbers either. Both contingents are screwing up any chance at a peace process. Both are playing dirty.
But that’s also the whole problem with the false equivalency. If someone is trying to break into your house and you end up having to fight them in a big mud hole outside to keep them from getting in to your wife and kids, no one is going to be clean. But that doesn’t mean the two combatants are morally equivalent.
Israel won a war it did not start, and it kept some of the land it occupied during that war. It’s given most of it back, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula. In the Camp David Accords Israel offered the Palestinians a bunch of things, including Gaza (which PLO now controls through subsequent agreements), shared control (but not sovereignty) over key Islamic parts of East Jerusalem), and the capacity to eventually control 92% of the West Bank (as defined by the “green line.”) So that basically means that for losing a war they helped start and in which they were major belligerents, Israel was keeping 8% of the West Bank. Note that this 8% was the most strategically important and is mostly filled with Jewish settlements now. Further, to even balance that out Israel was willing to cede territory within Israel proper over to the PLO to make up for the 8% of the West Bank that the Palestinians would be losing forever in the Camp David agreement. Yes, there were quibbling details about Israel wanting to offload unproductive shitty land in the deal but it never really got to the point where they could hash that out (and I’m sure they would) because Arafat was not genuinely interested in peace or a Palestinian state.
Israel gave the Palestinians the opportunity to have just as much land as they would have had if they had never participated in invasions of Israel something the West collectively didn’t offer countries like Japan, Germany, Austria etc etc who had previously started and lost big wars. If the Palestinians had been on the winning side in 1967 how much land would they have let Israel keep? This is what I mean about moral equivalency, Israel has done shitty stuff but they aren’t morally equivalent. They’ve offered genuinely reasonable peace, Palestinian statehood and etc. If the PLA had signed the Camp David agreement most likely as the years have passed Palestine would have seen dramatic improvements. What’s interesting is the Gaza Strip borders parts of Israel that even Arafat was not asking for at Camp David because it is basically 100% recognized Israeli land…yet Palestinians from Gaza frequently try to fire rockets into that part of Israel. That’s far stupider than anything Israel does, especially since security by the strip now is such that Israel often sees Palestinians preparing to launch rockets before they even get one off and kill them before they even know they have been spotted–that’s the definition of stupid behavior to me.
Huh? Germany got all its land back, except the Sudetenland, Alsace, and Lorraine, which were occupied territories.
Also - note the unconditional surrender, the de-Nazification campaign and there are still US troops in Germany.
Konigsberg?
Try almost a quarter of pre-Nazi era Germany:
Exactly Shmendrik and some of that land had been German land ruled by Germans (particularly the Hohenzollerns as Electors of Brandenburg and later Kings in/of Prussia) since the 1600s.